Scene: The year 1348, somewhere in Europe. Enter the bubonic plague, represented by lolling corpses and scurrying rats. Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), a conflicted young monk, has been recruited by a fanatically devout knight (Sean Bean) and his small band of church-hired mercenaries to lead them to a remote, pestilence-free village. Disturbed by rumors that the villagers are using sorcery to ward off the sickness, the bishop would like his heavily-armed goons to ask them very nicely to stop.

As it turns out, no one is without sin in “Black Death,” a grungy, cynical little number from the British director Christopher Smith that slams Christians against pagans with little love for either. Once reached, the village proves to be an eerily utopian goddess community with a “Wicker Man” vibe and a surfeit of slinky babes. But when the soldiers suspect that superior hygiene may not be the villagers’ sole defense against germs, it’s time for both sides to get medieval and for Osmund to choose a team.

With old-fashioned style and old-school effects — you can feel the weight of the broadswords and the crunchy resistance of every hacked head — “Black Death” takes Dark Ages drama to the limits of moral ambivalence. Here, excessive piety and rampant paganism are equally malevolent forces, the film’s baleful view of human nature mirrored in Sebastian Edschmid’s swampy photography. As is emphasized in a nicely consistent coda, the Lord’s side and the right side are not necessarily one and the same.